Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

A couple of issues have been identified. One is community supports. I know Senator Wall is coming at this from a rural perspective, as are many other Members. I am coming from an urban perspective. Urban isolation is as serious as rural isolation. One could be surrounded by 5,000 people but still be as lonely as the person who lives in the middle of the countryside. That is a really important thing we have to get across. I talked recently to the management in my local post office and they were chatting about the payments that started to be paid fortnightly. They said some people then did not come for their payments while others collected them on their behalf. The manager was really worried and concerned because that was their outlet. They went to the shop and to the post office and engaged with people and that was the only connection they had. Our local darts club organised meals on Sundays for vulnerable people. The payments only land from Monday to Friday, so we took on the Sunday aspect. I regularly did the Sunday afternoon run for perhaps eight or ten weeks for about ten or 12 vulnerable people on their own. The first day it took me about an hour to do, the second or third week it took two hours, and then it took three hours because they had nobody to talk to. We have to be really cognisant of that when we talk about isolation. It does not matter where the person lives. One can live in a massive estate and still be as isolated as a person in a rural area.

As for the community supports, when the chips are down we in Ireland always come together and support one another. I saw the incredible generosity of people who volunteered to pick up stuff from the pharmacy, do the shopping, cut grass, clean windows - whatever it was people were asked to do, they did it. We have to pull that together in some way. The opportunity now, as we come out of level 5, will be how we capture that again and ensure that that sense of community is not lost. I think that at times during the past ten or 15 years of the recession, the Celtic tiger and so on, people were just so stressed and so busy that in some ways that connection was lost. I think we have an opportunity now as legislators to figure out how we do this, how we support the local authorities, the local community groups, the local community centres, the resource centres and all those people who are there to help and to give us guidance and how we ensure that connection stays.

I wish to raise a few other connected issues. PUP payments for the under-18s were a missed opportunity. We talk about young people going to work or to college or taking on apprenticeships. There is a massive push in respect of apprenticeships. There are people on apprenticeships who are 17 years of age and who got nothing, and that was a shame. On the one hand, we are telling them that they are valued and that their skill set will be really valuable to our country in the next generation and, on the other, that they are not really that valued because they are not entitled to the PUP. We really have to work on that.

The final issue I wish to raise relates to the arts and music. We all like to go out and listen to music, go to concerts and plays and so on. I see a real issue coming down the line for some of the artists and musicians I know.

The past seven or eight months have been horrendous for them because they have lost everything. Their business fell off a cliff overnight and it does not look as though it will come back anytime soon. Many of them say that they got the PUP payments but they also have van insurance, equipment and all the overheads that still continued on which they were trying to keep up the payments. Now they are getting to the stage where they are looking for alternatives. They are saying that they cannot continue like this with the uncertainty of not knowing when they will work in the music industry or the arts industry again and they are leaving. I fear that they may not come back to that. Something we must consider is the supports. When the industry starts to reopen, we will need supports for them and they will need supports to ensure that they can get back into the industry. Individuals operating on a smaller scale who have their own equipment may come out of it a little quicker but there are bigger businesses that have warehouses of equipment and which now face the prospect of being unable to afford their rates and the repayments on their loans to buy equipment, some of which needs to be changed on a regular basis. It is something we need to consider in terms of the community. I see all of this in terms of the community. It is what we do; it is about the society that we build and what type of society we want to see coming out of this.